Several vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Linux kernel that
may lead to a denial of service or privilege escalation. The Common
Vulnerabilities and Exposures project identifies the following
problems:

Eugene Teo reported a local DoS issue in the ext2 and ext3
filesystems. Local users who have been granted the privileges
necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a corrupted
filesystem that causes the kernel to output error messages in an
infinite loop.

Milos Szeredi reported that the usage of splice() on files opened
with O_APPEND allows users to write to the file at arbitrary
offsets, enabling a bypass of possible assumed semantics of the
O_APPEND flag.

Eric Sesterhenn reported a local DoS issue in the hfsplus
filesystem. Local users who have been granted the privileges
necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a corrupted
filesystem that causes the kernel to overrun a buffer, resulting
in a system oops or memory corruption.

Eric Sesterhenn reported a local DoS issue in the hfsplus
filesystem. Local users who have been granted the privileges
necessary to mount a filesystem would be able to craft a corrupted
filesystem that results in a kernel oops due to an unchecked
return value.

Eric Sesterhenn reported a local DoS issue in the hfs filesystem.
Local users who have been granted the privileges necessary to
mount a filesystem would be able to craft a filesystem with a
corrupted catalog name length, resulting in a system oops or
memory corruption.

Dann Frazier reported a DoS condition that allows local users to
cause the out of memory handler to kill off privileged processes
or trigger soft lockups due to a starvation issue in the unix
socket subsystem.

For the stable distribution (etch), this problem has been fixed in
version 2.6.18.dfsg.1-23etch1.

We recommend that you upgrade your linux-2.6, fai-kernels, and
user-mode-linux packages.

Note: Debian 'etch' includes linux kernel packages based upon both the
2.6.18 and 2.6.24 linux releases. All known security issues are
carefully tracked against both packages and both packages will receive
security updates until security support for Debian 'etch'
concludes. However, given the high frequency at which low-severity
security issues are discovered in the kernel and the resource
requirements of doing an update, lower severity 2.6.18 and 2.6.24
updates will typically release in a staggered or "leap-frog" fashion.